From Berklee Library Research Guides
Recommended Reading
Books
The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability, and Indian Popular Cinema edited by Ashis Nandy
PN1993.5.I8 S43 1998 Check Availability
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| From Google Books:
"This book deals with an important and too-often ignored area of cultural studies. To examine the enormous industry of Indian popular cinema is to study Indian modernity at its very rawest. The questions and perspectives this book presents provoke a thinking of cinema that is political in the widest sense – from [cinemas'] importance in ideas of nation and national cultural formation to psycho-social perspectives on identity, class and gender."
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More about this book: 
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The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity by Darius Cooper
PN1998.3.R4 C66 2000 Check Availability
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| From Google Books:
"Satyajit Ray is India's greatest filmmaker and his importance in the international world of cinema has long been recognised. Darius Cooper's study of Ray is the first to examine his rich and varied work from a social and historical perspective, and to situate it within Indian aesthetics. Providing analyses of selected films, including those that comprise The Apu Trilogy, Chess Players, and Jalsaghhar, among others, Cooper outlines Western influences on Ray's work, such as the plight of women functioning within a patriarchal society, Ray's political vision of the 'doubly colonised', and his attack and critique of the Bengali/Indian middle class of today. The most comprehensive treatment of Ray's work, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray makes accessible the oeuvre of one of the most prolific and creative filmmakers of the twentieth century."
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The Cinematic imagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History by Jyotika Virdi
EBSCO ElectronicBook Check Availability
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| From the book's Preface:
"Positioning this book in the interstices between postcolonial, film, and cultural studies, I approach Hindi cinema here through several theoretical frames: the specter of globalization, the internationalization of cultural studies, considerations of the nation embedded in national cinema or postcoloniality, popular culture as a legitimate slate for reading social history, and the place of gender, sexuality, class, caste, and religious community in shaping that history."
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Genre, Gender, Race, and World Cinema edited by Julie F. Codell
PN1995.9.S6 G46 2007 Check Availability
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| From Google Books:
"Genre, Gender, Race, and World Cinema is an innovative anthology that introduces the study of film theory using the four topics of genre, gender, race, and world cinema, to encourage critical discussion."
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Mother India = Madara Iṇḍīya by Gayatri Chatterjee
PN1997.M684 C43 2002 Check Availability
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| From the publisher:
"Based on new research into the Mehboob studio archives Gayatri Chatterjee outlines the film's [Mother India] eventful production history and the ambitious vision of its director. In her careful analysis of the film Chatterjee reflects its vibrancy and passion and illuminates its many aspects - performance styles, reception and reputation, mythological underpinnings, its relation to post-Independence culture and politics, its many references to the history of a country in transition."
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Articles
Alessandrini, Anthony C.
"'My Heart's Indian for All That': Bollywood Film between Home and Diaspora." Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 10.3 (Winter 2001): 315-40. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 30 June 2011.
Abstract: "Addresses the efforts made by the film industry to adapt to India's economic liberalization policy of the 1980s and 1990s. Discussion on how the liberalization policy has repositioned the industry in the global market; Forces that shaped the development of Indian popular cinema; Significance of the film Hum Aapake Hain Koun! by Sooraj Barjatya, to the Hindi film industry."
Read article here.
Chaudhuri, Shohini
"Snake Charmers and Child Brides: Deepa Mehta's Water, 'Exotic' Representation, and the Cross-Cultural Spectatorship of South Asian Migrant Cinema." South Asian Popular Culture 7.1 (2009): 7-20. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 30 June 2011.
Abstract: "The high media profile and 'crossover' success of South Asian migrant filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta has often bred accusations that they deliberately package themes and aesthetics in order to stir up controversy and produce an 'exotic' India for global audiences. This claim has recently been played out in relation to the Oscar-nominated film Water (2005), which provoked protests from Hindu fundamentalists and death threats to Mehta and her crew. My article argues that exoticist representation is a significant tendency within contemporary world cinema and needs to be addressed without the customary moral condemnation implied in both popular reactions and academic studies that favour more experimental works."
Read article here.
Chute, David
"The Big B." Film Comment 41.2 (Mar./Apr. 2005): 50-6. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 30 June 2011.
Abstract: The article focuses on Amitabh Bachchan, superstar of Indian cinema. According to the author, he loves watching Bachchan dance, which is not to suggest that the most durable star in the history of Hindi cinema is celebrated for his fancy footwork. In fact apart from his undoubted acting chops and the sheer force of his brooding masculine charisma, he is most fervently admired for his verbal gifts: the sonorous baritone that makes all his set-piece speeches sound like mosaic proclamations, and the flair for mimicry he exploits as one of the first Bollywood actors to adopt authentic Bombay street slang in his gangster roles."
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Kaur, Ravinder
"Viewing the West through Bollywood: A Celluloid Occident in the Making." Contemporary South Asia 11.2 (2002): 199-209. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 30 June 2011.
Abstract: "The present article locates the Hindi films in the realm of fast-changing contemporary India with its new market-friendly economy, a globalised and upwardly mobile middle class, a vast dispora that constantly searches for authentic Indian values, and a huge, exportable, techno-savvy workforce that thrives on growing western pop-dominated cultural forms such as Bhangra/Indi pop-music and Hinglish theatre. The search for authentic Indian values, however unintentionally, reveals the long-held images of the West and the eventual making of a cellulod Occident."
Read article here.
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